My wife and I didn’t consider homeschooling until the summer before kindergarten.
One of the things I most regret not learning about before we started was that we had already started. The state’s calendar has nothing to do with healthy learning or development.
Academics are not primary for us. If an individual is physically secure, spiritually fulfilled, and mentally healthy, he/she will know what, when, and how to learn.
I wish I had learned about deschooling and unschooling before I started. Breaking down the assumptions of the governmental education system was critical for my personal healing and in creating a better learning environment for my children.
I post a lot about unschooling and I see it in such broad terms that I could include all of my Learning Lifestyle posts as part of that subject. At root, it is a learning environment focused on individual needs, desires, and talents. We do this as adults, whether it’s attending a voluntary training course through work, borrowing a book, or joining a gym. We take ownership of our interests and feed them. There is no reason that children shouldn’t have the same opportunity. The sooner they learn how to fuel their own growth, the sooner they become free of influences that claim authority.
I was already unschooling myself, I just needed to apply the concept to our home education lifestyle. Deschooling runs deeper. It changed my life, opened me up to faith in Christ, and has allowed for perpetual healing.
In the homeschool world, “deschooling” is the process of pulling a child from a learning institution to begin home education. It usually consists of a “break” from schoolwork and there are loose formulas for X number weeks of break to reset from Y number of years in school.
My children were never in school, so they weren’t in great need of a break from that, but I learned about this process as I was recreating MY school experience in our home. I was the one who needed to deschool after a decade and a half in educational institutions.
The start/stop bells, busy work, grades, and authoritarian rule were the easiest for me to identify and put on the chopping block. I like to follow through on ideas to the end of their logical usefulness and started analyzing the social habits, fears, and assumptions about my fellow man that I had carried from school into parenthood. I did not like much of it. I started looking closely at the programming and patterns from my youth that were not healthy. I dug deeper to find parental and multi-generational traumas that I was, and am, carrying.
There is no end to the logical usefulness of deschooling.
At a glorious point on the journey you no longer blame school, your parents, or The System. You see that everyone is broken in infinite ways. That means we each have the gift of inifinite healing in a lifetime. That means I can gift my children with an inheritance of a better way to live.
I can’t think of a better intention to have toward my role in my children’s development.